Posts Tagged ‘graphic cards’

It looks like AMD has outrun NVIDIA today. Its World’s First Microsoft DirectX® 11 Graphics Processor, presented a few hours ago in Taipei, is currently the best hardware for Windows 7. Catch up, NVIDIA! However not many details of it suggested. At least enjoy the graphics:

Technically, Quadro FX 4800 is very similar to GeForce GTX 280. But have a look at the Performance Comparison. On some tests, Quadro is up to 10 times faster than GeForce. Yes, almost the same GPU. Yes, same version of drivers. Amazing. Just note that the retail price on FX 4800 is in $1600-$2000 range. But if it can do password cracking at much higher rate than GeForce (again, we never tried it, sorry), it looks like a good investment.

In case if you missed it: new ATI Catalyst drivers (9.4) now available (you can read the release notes for details). For some reason, some driver files have been renamed (well, not in 9.4, but in 9.3 released a bit earlier, though that version was really buggy and we cannot recommend to use it anyway), and our WPA password recovery (audit) software was not able to recognize Radeon cards anymore.

In the meantime, NVIDIA CUDA 2.2 (beta) released. Does that actually matter? Yes, because NVIDIA Tesla C1060 and S1070 are now officially supported on Windows. Besides, we need to have a look at Zero-copy support for direct access to system memory, because it may speed-up the GPU-enabled password cracking on some particular algorithms.

The German c’t magazine (issue 06/09) has published an article about cracking of NTLM-hashes with graphic cards. In this article pen test experts from SySS GmbH bring up a touchy question of how fast an intruder can break into your system. How long should your Windows logon password be, so that you could keep having your beauty sleep?

Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery was run on dual-core AMD Athlon X2 4850e, 2.5 GHz, with Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX installed. The cost of the test system is worth the effort. One can fetch it for only $1K.